Betrayal at the House on the Hill

Robert and Lenora came over last night to play Robert's copy of Betrayal at the House on the Hill.

Betrayal is a co-operative, exploration game until a certain point. After this, it is one player (the betrayer) against the rest of the players. In the first part of the game, all the players are exploring a mansion and collecting better stats and gear, while learning more about the mansion. The gear and the stats are improved by three different kinds of cards, Event cards (which could increase or decrease abilities), Item cards (revolvers, candles, dogs etc) or Omen cards (items like a madman, or a lost girl, or bad things). When an Omen card is drawn, you must roll 6 special dice and roll higher than the number of Omen cards in play, if you do not, the Haunt happens (which I will explain later).

The 6 dice you roll are special 6 sided dice. They have 3 different values on them, two each of blank, one or two pips. This means that you can generate any value from 0-12 on the Omen roll.

Once the Omen roll is made (number of Omen cards exceeds the dice roll), the player that started the Haunt looks in the scenario book to determine which haunt will happen. This determines who is the Betrayer and what the scenario is. Both sides take their books and determine what they have to do to win.

The game then changes, and the player to the left of the Betrayer goes first and play proceeds similar to before the Haunt, except both have different victory conditions. I don't want to give the scenario away, suffice to say, Brenda was the Betrayer and her victory conditions were to kill us all. Unfortunately, the person she was closest to was the strongest player so she tried to build up her Might so she could fight. The rest of us were not restricted by this (we had different victory conditions) , and we managed to fulfill ours before she could.

I like the game, it has 50 scenarios so there is some replayability in the game (how many board games have you played 50 times?) and the board setup changes every game, which makes it a fun experience.

After that we played a couple of other games before Lenora and Robert had to leave. The other games we played were: Zombie Fluxx, a fun little card game I introduced to them a couple of weeks ago. Lenora won, on her turn,, which is a rarity, as most of us win on someone elses' turn. The other was Dominion: Intrigue, which was won by Brenda in a close tight scoring game 39-35-35-34. I like Dominion, but I dislike the cards with Curses on them. This game had none, and Brenda won due to her Duchy/Duke strategy (6 duchies, 3 dukes) gave her the win.

Friday night we went out to a Meetup near us and taught a couple of games. First we taught some first time attendees Dominion (which Brenda won), then while I was helping a couple learn Carcassonne: The Discovery (she won and wanted to buy a copy of the game), while Brenda taught Small World to the couple we played Dominion with. Vivian won, in a roll and they both enjoyed it and discussed buying Dominion. Brenda and I finished the night teaching Canal Mania to a couple of other players. I won...

Two good nights of gaming, I got to play Canal Mania, a game that I quite like and Betrayal, not to mention Dominion...